2000-11-07

Ralph Nader's election night speech

11.07.00 | First, let me thank all these people who worked on the
campaign. What we know for sure is that we're coming out of this
election day with the third-largest party in America, replacing the
Reform Party. Building a long-term progressive reform movement.
That's really quite an achievement, it took lot of people from all
over the country to do that, so, great staff, working day and night
here in Washington, and above all it took a commitment by people
to no longer settle for the least of the worst or the lesser of two
evils, where at the end of the day you're still stuck with worst and
evil.

To try to challenge the entrenched two-party system, this is really a
lot what the campaign was about. The two parties raised these
statutory barriers to get on the ballot, and they campaign with
most of the money by raising corrupt soft money, and corporate
money and PAC money -- all of which we rejected, because we
wanted to set an example of what is necessary for real reform of
our corrupt campaign system.

And of course you're up against (the fact that) most of the
coverage on the horse race was between these two horses. They're
tired and hollow, and have forgotten even to eat their oats in order
to reinvigorate themselves. And then, the two parties control the
debate commission which is really a private company. And they
exclude Third Party candidates, so really it's a quite amazing and
varied system of rigging the election for the two major parties. ...
It's why the two major parties can't regenerate themselves because
their excluding all kinds of competition, and instead, imitating
themselves.

The Republican and Democratic parties take more money from the
same sources, they morph into one corporate party with two heads,
and (then Americans) presume that it really matters for the State
Department, or Defense Department or Treasury Department, or
Department of Commerce, Labor, Agriculture, or the health and
safety regulatory agencies … whether Gore or Bush is in the White
House (but it isn’t) because they don't make the decisions. The
decisions are made by the people we trip over in Washington D.C.
every day: 22,000 corporate lobbyists, and 9,000 political action
committees pumping money into both Republican and Democratic
coffers.

This is what we expected was gonna happen, and we took 'em on.
And the important thing here is we've reached a take-off stage in
the Green Party, and that this is the last time that the two parties
in a national election will have a monopoly power to exclude
significant Third-Party members from the debate. ...

Going around the country you get the feeling that there are
millions of people who are really ready for a new progressive
political movement, and it takes a lot of work to get them
together, and to believe that they can do it, because of the
dominance of the two-party duopoly.

But we have now seen enormous talent come out from all over the
country, not just in local state Green parties, like Medea Benjamin
in California, but we've seen seasoned citizen activists, who
recognize that the civil society has been crowded out in Washington
increasingly the last 20 years by the two corporate powers, and we
have to heed Thomas Jefferson's wisdom, that when our country is
taken away from us, we have to go into the political arena and
mobilize new political civic energy throughout the United States in
order to come back and take our government back from the
corporate supremacists who think that there's nothing they can't
control, there's nothing that they can't commercialize, there's
nothing that they cannot daunt. And we're going to prove them
wrong.

Most members of the press misread the distinction of this Green
Party's mobilization. They said “Well, it's just another Green Party,
and makes a valiant effort, election's over and then it recedes,
and their leaders go back to their business in Texas or elsewhere.”
...

Right after the election the Green Party moves and locks arms with
all those neighborhood and citizen groups all over the United
States who are fighting for a more just America. Who are fighting
for the environment, fighting to establish missions against poverty,
and enforcing the civil rights laws and civil liberties laws. Missions
that say to the American people, that the choice is the sovereignty
of the people, or the sovereignty of global corporations over the
United States of America, and that's an easy choice to decide on
whose side we're going to be.

Also it's important to note that in our country you cannot fire a
citizen. ... The Green Party is going to give an authenticity ....
Standing with labor, living wage issues. You know? There's no
Republican parties, no Democratic parties in those struggles. The
two parties after election, they take a few days off, they relax, and
then they turn themselves into money-raising machines for the
duration. While the Green Party turns itself into a civic force.

We had some funny mention moments -- and I don't mean going
on Saturday Night Live, or David Letterman -- we had some funny
moments when … MasterCard was foolish enough to sue us. Saying
that we violated their trademark registration on the word
“priceless.” They put a price on “priceless!”

So all these moments will be recalled with pleasure, because we
really performed I think all of us in a very exemplary manner.
There's a lot of content behind David Broder -- the Washington
Post political editor -- who this Sunday wrote a column that said
“Who ran the best campaign in the presidential campaign year?”
And he said hands-down, it was the Green Party and the
Nader/LaDuke campaign.

Bush came in second and Gore third. And I tell you -- anyone who
knows Dave Broder knows that he does not deal out praise very
liberally. ... But I think it reflects that we really practiced what we
preached in order to preach what we practiced. Not just in the way
we raised our funds, but in the way we comported ourselves,
focusing on one important issue after another, which the media
systemically ignored, as it continues to pepper us with this horse
race question.

It's really quite unique in the sense that having received one
percent of the national media coverage, and having raised less
than one percent of the money, and having been excluded from
the debates, that the majority of the coverage was on the horse
race. “Are you gonna be a spoiler?” And I would say “Well, you
can't spoil a system spoiled to the core.”

It'd be so predictable that the reporters would say “I know you've
been asked about this one thousand times” -- I felt like having a
recorded announcement, but then that would have been too much
like the corporations. ... It really didn't give us a chance to raise
the subject matter that the press over the years have been
reporting on. Corporate crime, corporate welfare, the problem of
labor and the living wage, WTO and NAFTA -- all these things that
are reported on in the major press -- the Gore, Bush campaigns
ignored all these issues uniformly in their lookalike status, and still
the press was obsessed with the horse-race question.

So one of our goals after the election, is to, in a very kindly way,
give some of the media an invitation to learn about what the
criteria are for newsworthiness for a Third-Party candidacy. We
attracted the largest mass paid political rallies by far of any
presidential candidate; Madison Square Garden, to Boston Garden,
to Target Center, all the huge arenas we filled with Green Party
enthusiasts. That's one criteria.

Another is our 37-year record on weekends and during weekdays of
fighting for the American people for safer cars, and food and air
and water, and trying to make the government more accountable
and the corporations more responsive.

And the third criteria is that we have all kinds of people organized
all over the country working their hearts out and their minds out for
our effort. And the fourth criteria is that we were above the screen
in the polls, they thought that was an important criteria. So we had
the agenda, we had the rallies, we had the record, we had the polls
rising. And still it wasn't newsworthy. So you see, a lot of these
journalists are caught in a trap, a kind of time warp, and we've got
to liberate them as well.

I want to thank people for voting for us. The people who have yet
to vote out in the West Coast and Alaska and Hawaii, they can
certainly build our reservoir of voters so we can build more after
this election day with a great second leap forward in 2002, with all
kinds of great people running for local, state and federal office.
Building not only an exemplary election record, not just building a
unifying force in civil society, but above all, building a deeper
democracy. That's what it's really all about, building a deep
democracy, so we can really put some reality into this hollow
phrase, "a government of, by and for the people.”